RIP Roberta Flack

[poindexter]

Never cared for her that much. Nice voice, but no Aretha, Dionne or Gladys.
Not to speak ill of the dead. She won her share of Grammys, but IMO the Grammy is a BS award.

Jesus, thanks for sharing.

 

[Mr._Graybeard]

Jesus, thanks for sharing.

Hey, my opinion. She was about a soulful as Helen Reddy. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

 

[garrow]

She had a great career. Feel Like Makin' Love is her magnum opus. So 70s. RIP.

 

[Baron Scicluna]

Not to confuse with her more well-known hit "Feel Like Makin' Love", but her song, "Making Love" was one of those lost hits that I remembered as a kid that I used to spend a lot of recent time googling and yahooing trying to discover it again until one day I heard it on the radio, frantically typed in some lyrics and found again.

I always thought it was a mid-70s song, but it actually came out in 1982 as the theme song for movie that was about a couple breaking up because the man came out as gay.



Always enjoyed this song. RIP Roberta.

 

[Twirling Time]

I dreaded every trip to the mall as a kid because my mom would buy every Roberta Flack album we didn't have already and then wear out the record upon home arrival to smithereens. There was only one antidote.


Aerosmith.

 

[Slacker]

Not to confuse with her more well-known hit "Feel Like Makin' Love", but her song, "Making Love" was one of those lost hits that I remembered as a kid that I used to spend a lot of recent time googling and yahooing trying to discover it again until one day I heard it on the radio, frantically typed in some lyrics and found again.

I always thought it was a mid-70s song, but it actually came out in 1982 as the theme song for movie that was about a couple breaking up because the man came out as gay.



Always enjoyed this song. RIP Roberta.

Well, there goes your man card. Thoughts and prayers, etc.

 

[dixiehack]

I suspect which version of Killing Me Softly sounds right to the listener depends on which version they heard first. I had to go pull up Flack's version to hear it all the way through for the first time so I would stop subconsciously defaulting to the Fugees video. I had heard Flack's intro before but that was it.

You can tell she had a great voice and there was a gem of a song in there if you could extract it from the orchestration. But my God the music bed gave the sensation of floating along in a wood-paneled LTD wagon for an afternoon of shopping at a mall with even more wood paneling. Very much of its time and I don't think it held up well. (Not that the ending of the Fugees video isn't a moldy time capsule itself. Thirty years now!)

Worse, the music on Flack's version drowned out her vocals on occasion and just became a barbiturate-soaked slog, like a bored housewife chasing her pills with Riunite. Dare I say the Fugees had the cleaner arrangement, beat drops and all?

 

[Webster]

I do like using the phrase "it's like you found my letters and read each one out loud"

 

[dixiehack]

I do like the song, which I probably didn't do a good job of conveying.

 

[BTExpress]

I miss wood paneling. Sigh.

 

[Huggy]

I miss wood paneling. Sigh.

Whatever happened to Z-Brick, anyway?

 

[Hermes]

Good news for you guys. Mid-century style is back. That means we're close to 1970s style being back, too.